curated by the Atticus Books staff
Hell Yeah! Worthy is a weekly Friday feature where our staff distills the plethora of scat on the Internet into a succinct list of the best you haven’t seen, the best you ignored, and the best you should visit again.
photo: Shawn Rossi via Flickr
Opening Your Heart – Literally – On Twitter
Twitter is amazing because you can easily share anything you want with the entire world. On the flip side, Twitter is terrifying because the entire world (or at least those people you follow) can share anything they want with you. The Word’s First Live-Tweeted Open Heart Surgery absolutely falls into the “amazing” category. The surgeon’s colleague provided 140-character tweets throughout the entire two and a half hour procedure, answering questions from followers and sharing pictures and videos. While the surgery was originally expected to attract about 50 to 100 followers, media attention has exploded worldwide. No wonder, when we’re able to lift the curtain on experiences we might otherwise never see, much less understand. (Libby)
Introducing: The Reader-Voyeur
When you’re a book nerd, anything that gives you a peek into authors’ lives is bookmark worthy. This has been a particularly good week for the reader-voyeur. F*ck Yeah Manuscripts is a fascinating Tumblr dedicated to the drafts, outlines, and notes for everything for J.K. Rowling’s The Order of the Phoenix to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Apartment Therapy showcased photos of fifteen writers’ bedrooms, including William Faulkner’s austere office-like space and Victor Hugo’s lavishly decorated room. Finally, Writers and Kitties is exactly as advertised: photos of writers (Stephen King, William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and, of course, Hemingway) with cats. How did readers in the pre-Internet era survive without treasures such as these? (Lacey)
National Portal to Historic Collections
Occasionally it’s good to lift your head from the underworld of fiction and learn about your country’s history. When you begin rooting around Google Land like a cyberspace archaeologist, you realize how much we take for granted.
We have historical treasures at our fingertips, hidden artifacts once known to only a select group of curators… and now they’re literally just a URL from Joe the Plumber’s line of perception. The American Heritage Society, along with the American Association for State and Local History, has tackled “a massive, multiyear project to provide information on 4,000 historical sites, including easily searchable online access to digital images and descriptions of millions of artifacts housed in the collections of American museums, historical societies, National Parks, and other institutions across the country.”
Go. Dig. Discover. See just how remarkable these times are. In your travels, you may see a personal interest surface that you never knew existed. (Dan)